The waiting game continues in Charm City. A spokesperson for embattled (and missing) Mayor Catherine Pugh told us last week that she would be making a decision by today as to her possible resignation under a cloud of scandal and recent federal raids of her home and offices. Now it looks like that won’t be happening either. One of her attorneys came out of her home earlier in the day and said not to expect any news. (CBS Baltimore)
The lawyer for Baltimore’s embattled mayor says not to expect a significant announcement about her future Tuesday.
Last week, attorney Steve Silverman said he would be meeting with Mayor Catherine Pugh Tuesday and hoped her mental and physical condition had improved enough to provide “clarity” on her future.
The FBI says a series of electronic billboards that have gone up around Baltimore asking people to report public corruption have nothing to do with the investigation into the mayor. FBI agents raided Pugh’s homes and City Hall five days ago.
Meanwhile, one of her former aides was caught on record saying that some of her earliest comments about the Healthy Holly book scandal simply “weren’t true.” You’ll recall that in her initial defense against the “media witch hunt,” Pugh told the Baltimore Sun that she had only sold books to the University of Maryland Medical System (UMMS). But an email involving the aide, obtained through an FOIA request, indicated she definitely recalled books being sold to one part of the Kaiser medical network. (That fact was already uncovered by reporters, but it’s the first official record indicating that Pugh knowingly lied about it.)
So if she lied about that, how much else was a lie? Did she really pay taxes on the nearly one million dollars she raked in on this scam? The presence of the IRS in the recent raids suggests that might not have been the truth either. And on an unrelated note, how is it that nobody outside of her own staff and attorneys has seen the Mayor in over a month? They keep claiming that she’s on medical leave recovering from pneumonia, but if you’ve been knocked down by a bout of pneumonia for a month without going to the hospital, odds are that you’re already dead. That sounds like another fabrication.
Meanwhile, Pugh remains on the city payroll, collecting what the local media estimates is in the range of $500 per day in salary for her “job” as mayor. She has everything she needs delivered to her house and she can simply refuse to talk to the press and answer any uncomfortable questions. Pretty sweet work if you can get it, eh?
Join the conversation as a VIP Member